Prison Murders

The fatal stabbing of an officer by an inmate at the Chino men's prison might have been prevented if guards had not routinely violated security protocols and if managers had properly housed the alleged assailant in a cell for violent convicts, an investigative report concluded Wednesday. In response to the findings, state corrections officials placed Warden Lori DiCarlo and two chief deputies on paid administrative leave and launched a widespread audit of prison operations.

DeAndre Howard spent more than a decade in prison for a murder he knew he didn't commit. After years of fighting for his innocence from behind bars, a federal judge had finally granted him an appeal. Prosecutors, he said, gave him a choice. He could plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter and get out in time for a Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Or he could go back to trial and risk spending the rest of his life in prison. He chose trial. That felt final. It felt right.

Shane Wilson is tough and tattooed, a former Nazi Low Rider gang member with a long criminal record. "I'm a big guy, I'm a bad guy," Wilson said in a jailhouse interview Thursday. But when he agreed to testify against a suspected murderer in exchange for a lighter sentence, Wilson said, "I was scared for my life." Witnesses are targets, he said, especially in jail: "In my world, if you testify, you put your life in jeopardy -- bottom line."

A former IRS agent who opened a tax preparation business was sentenced Friday to nearly 24 years in prison for defrauding clients out of more than $11 million and then attempting to hire a hit man to kill four of them. Steven Martinez, 51, of Ramona was sentenced in San Diego federal court to 286 months in prison and five years of supervised release. He was also ordered by District Court Judge William Hayes to forfeit all the property, including a home in Mexico, and other possessions that he purchased with clients' money.

David Paul Hammer appears fated to die the way he killed his cellmate, Andrew Hunt Marti--inside a small prison room, his arms and legs strapped down, lying face up to a world that will do just as well without him. Hammer murdered Marti nearly five years ago, slowly strangling him in his lower bunk in cell 103 of the Allenwood penitentiary. With the federal government soon to begin executing prisoners again, Hammer at this moment is the first in line.

State prison officials on Friday removed the warden and two deputy wardens from their posts at the California Institution for Men in Chino after an investigation determined that mismanagement and security lapses contributed to the slaying of a guard in January.

Gang members rioted in at least seven Guatemalan prisons, attacking rivals with grenades, guns and knives in coordinated chaos that left 31 inmates dead, officials said. The riots apparently began with attacks by members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang against rivals in the M-18 gang, Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann said. Vielmann said the violence was under control shortly after noon.

A fellow death row inmate killed Donald Leroy Evans, who once confessed to dozens of murders and led police in several states on fruitless searches for bodies, authorities said. Evans, 41, was stabbed at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman while being led back to his cell after a shower, a prison spokesman said. The Texas drifter was sentenced to death in 1993.

Hundreds of federal agents and soldiers seized the top-security Matamoros prison near the Texas border, a week after six prison employees were slain and their bodies left outside the facility's gates. The prison raid was the second in a month as the government tries to regain control of penitentiaries, where a volatile mix of corruption and vendettas among imprisoned drug lords has corroded security. On Jan.

The head of Guatemala's prison system resigned after the killings of four policemen inside a maximum-security prison raised fears of drug-gang links to senior officials. Victor Rosales stepped down two days after the resignations of the interior minister and the chief of police were accepted in the wake of the slayings of three Salvadoran politicians and their driver and four of the Guatemalan police officers accused of killing them.

A Supreme Court case testing whether a prosecutor can be sued for framing suspects for a murder ended Monday when an Iowa county agreed to pay $12 million to two men who were freed after spending 26 years in prison. In the past, the high court had said prosecutors could not be sued for doing their jobs, even if they sometimes convicted the wrong defendant. And in November, an Obama administration lawyer argued on behalf of Pottawattamie County, asserting that there is no constitutional "right not to be framed."

Among the inmates at the Clark County Detention Center in the summer of 2006 was a local celebrity, an ex-cop whose long fight to reverse his murder conviction still intrigued his hometown. Ronald L. Mortensen had been a rookie Las Vegas police officer the night he and his partner went on a drunken off-duty spree. It ended with a fatal shooting. Was it Mortensen or his partner who pulled the trigger? The question dominated a sensational trial in 1997.

The Orange County district attorney's office is investigating the death of an inmate who had been hospitalized with an illness. The 43-year-old Westminster man, an inmate at the medical ward of Theo Lacy Jail, had severe anemia and was transferred to UCI Medical Center in Orange on Oct. 9, said Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino. The inmate's health worsened, and he died at 2:35 p.m. Sunday. The man, whose name was being withheld until his family was notified, was arrested Oct.

A white supremacist gang member was sentenced Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for murdering a fellow gang member who had appeared on television to discuss gang secrets. Jacob Anthony Rump, 30, was convicted in the 2002 murder of Scott Miller, one of Public Enemy Number One's founding members, who had appeared on a Fox 11 News broadcast focusing on the gang.

The head of Guatemala's prison system resigned after the killings of four policemen inside a maximum-security prison raised fears of drug-gang links to senior officials. Victor Rosales stepped down two days after the resignations of the interior minister and the chief of police were accepted in the wake of the slayings of three Salvadoran politicians and their driver and four of the Guatemalan police officers accused of killing them.

The father of an inmate stomped to death in an Orange County jail has filed a $20-million claim alleging that sheriff's guards instigated the attack by prisoners against his son. John Chamberlain, 41, was killed Oct. 5 at Theo Lacy Jail in Orange. This week his father, George Chamberlain, 79, of Chino Valley, Ariz.

At least 13 inmates were killed and 30 wounded in a shootout among prisoners on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, officials said. Honduran Security Minister Armando Calidonio said police and guards later restored control at National Penitentiary, the nation's largest. He said officials had yet to determine how inmates had obtained guns. The clash occurred at a cellblock known as Casa Blanca, which holds about 200 of the most dangerous inmates.

October 24, 2006 | Dana Parsons, Dana Parsons' column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.

He was a nobody, if not worse. He was a nobody lowlife. At least that's the way it must have seemed to whoever killed John Chamberlain. In an Orange County jail on charges of possessing child pornography, Chamberlain allegedly was kicked to death this month by a group of inmates at Theo Lacy Jail who apparently thought, mistakenly, that he'd been accused of child molestation. In many prison cultures, that accusation is enough to get the crud knocked out of you.

An inmate in Phoenix was indicted on a first-degree murder charge in the prison killing of a Jewish Defense League activist. David Frank Jennings, 30, an inmate at the Phoenix Federal Correctional Institution, is accused of killing Earl Leslie Krugel, 62, on Nov. 4. Krugel was arrested in 2001 and charged with conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and a field office of Republican Rep. Darrell E. Issa. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in 2003.